The life of Liszt is so crowded with important incidents that it is difficult to condense into the brief limits of a sketch any fairly adequate statement of his career.  He was born October 22, 1811, in the village of Raiding, in Hungary, and it is said that his father Adam Liszt, who was in the service of the Prince Esterhazy, was firmly convinced that the child would become distinguished on account of the appearance of a remarkable comet during the year.  Adam Liszt himself was a fine pianist, gifted indeed with a talent which might have made him eminent had he pursued it.  All his ambition and hope, however, centered in his son, in whom musical genius quickly declared itself; and the father found teaching this gifted child not only a labor of love, but a task smoothed by the extraordinary aptness of the pupil.  He was accustomed to say to the young Franz:  “My son, you are destined to realize the glorious ideal that has shone in vain before my youth.  In you that is to reach its fulfillment which I have myself but faintly conceived.  In you shall my genius grow up and bear fruit; I shall renew my youth in you even after I am laid in the grave.”  Such prophetic words recall the vision of the Genoese woman, who foresaw the future greatness of the little Nicolo Paganini, a genius who resembled in many ways the phenomenal musical force embodied in Franz Liszt.  When the lad was very young, perhaps not more than six, he read the “Kene” of Chateaubriand, and it made such an indelible impression on his mind that he in after years spoke of it as having been one of the most potent influences of his life, since it stimulated the natural melancholy of his character when his nature was most flexible and impressible.

At the age of nine he made his first appearance in public at Odenburg, playing Bies’s concerto in three flats, and improvising a fantasia so full of melodic ideas, striking rhythms, and well-arranged harmony as to strike the audience with surprise and admiration.  Among the hearers was Prince Esterhazy, who was so pleased with the precocious talent shown that he put a purse of fifty ducats in the young musician’s hand.  Soon after this Adam Liszt went to Pres-burg to live, and several noblemen, among whom were Prince Esterhazy, and the Counts Amadee and Szapary, all of them enthusiastic patrons of music, determined to bear the burden of the boy’s musical education.  To this end they agreed to allow him six hundred florins a year for six years.  Young Liszt was placed at Vienna under the tutelage of the celebrated pianist and teacher Czerny, and soon made such progress that he was able to play such works as those even of Beethoven and Hummel at first sight.  When Liszt did this for one of Hummel’s most difficult concertos, at the rooms of the music publisher one day, it created a great sensation in Vienna, and he quickly became one of the lions of the drawing-rooms of the capital.  Czerny himself was so much delighted with the genius of his charge that he refused to accept the three hundred florins stipulated for his lessons, saying he was but too well repaid by the success of the pupil.